Apple touts major 60% leap in Safari and WebKit performance

Apple’s WebKit team has published a new blog post this week detailing how they’ve made significant upgrades to Safari’s performance over the last several months. The improvements come following the debut of Speedometer 3.0 in March, described as a “major step forward in making the web faster for all.”

Back in March, Apple, Google, and Mozilla teamed up to launch the new Speedometer 3 browser benchmark. The goal of Speedometer 3 is to “create a shared understanding of web performance so that improvements can be made to enhance the user experience.”

The results provided by Speedometer 3 offer more details on how the test “captures and calculates scores, show more detailed results and introduce an even wider variety of workloads.” Apple says:

The introduction of Speedometer 3.0 is a major step forward in making the web faster for all, and allowing Web developers to make websites and web apps that were not previously possible.

Apple’s WebKit team says that it has successfully improved Safari’s Speedometer 3.0 score by ~60% between the release of Safari 17.0 in September and Safari 17.4’s release in March. These improvements, Apple says, mean that developers can build websites and web apps that are faster than ever before:

With all these optimizations and dozens more, we were able to improve the overall Speedometer 3.0 score by ~60% between Safari 17.0 and Safari 17.4. Even though individual progressions were often less than 1%, over time, they all stacked up together to make a big difference.

Because some of these optimizations also benefited Speedometer 2.1, Safari 17.4 is also ~13% faster than Safari 17.0 on Speedometer 2.1. We’re thrilled to deliver these performance improvements to our users allowing web developers to build websites and web apps that are more responsive and snappier than ever.

The full blog post has a ton of technical details on the work that has been done to optimize WebKit and Safari for Speedometer 3.0.

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